How to Save Our Frozen Worlds: Clean Energy

Wildflower meadows, seagrass beds, mangroves, marshlands, and our glorious jungles can all help capture the excess of carbon in our atmosphere and help stabilize our climate. These ecosystems are brilliant balancing tools that Earth has built-in. But we need to protect and expand on them.

…consider the power of exponential change to replace fossil fuels with renewables. If we start with a small change, but double it every few years, it soon becomes enormous.

In practice, it means every time we meet a clean energy target, we need to double our ambition. If our governments and businesses accelerate this transition to clean energy with every decision they make, and if we all choose clean energy with every opportunity, we could pull off one of the most remarkable human feats of all time.

The good news is that we’ve already begun to make those changes. From the Natural Resources Defense Council in 2017, “nearly 1 million Americans are working near- or full-time in the energy efficiency, solar, wind, and alternative vehicles sectors. This is almost five times the current employment in the fossil fuel electric industry, which includes coal, gas, and oil workers.” Attenborough continues:

“The cost of solar power has fallen more than 70% in seven years. The cost of producing energy from some renewable sources is already undercutting fossil fuels. In the US, employment in solar energy is growing nine times faster than the rest of the economy. While for every dollar invests into clean energy, China invests two.

By 2040, more than half of new cars sold will be electric. There is no question: In the future, everything we do will be powered by clean, renewable energy. But the question remains: Can we get there fast enough?

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